Life
Helen Keller said it best: “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”
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There are people whose deaths make us realise how much of our lives they had quietly occupied. Dolly Parton was one of those people. The tributes will rightly celebrate the extraordinary voice, the songs, the films, the rhinestones, the towering blonde hair, the humour, the business empire and the philanthropy. But I don’t think that…
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This week, I found myself sitting for hours in a packed public hospital waiting room. The queue barely moved. Plastic chairs scraped on the floor, babies cried somewhere in the distance, and every few minutes someone would sigh loudly and ask, “Who’s the last one in the line?” It was the kind of scene that…
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There is a quiet moment that comes before any serious act of writing. It is not the moment of inspiration, as it is often described. Not a sudden idea or a clear sentence forming fully in the mind. It is something slower, less certain. A kind of hesitation. The recognition that there is something you…
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What must we think when a president, during a press conference, can hone in on a journalist doing her job and say, “she’s a horror show”, and the moment simply passes? Not merely passes politically, but morally. No visible discomfort from those around him. No meaningful defence of the journalist’s dignity. No national conversation about…
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How I found comfort in the queue for a Covid-19 vaccination. Thursday afternoon my phone buzzed with an SMS, “you have been scheduled for vaccination on 21 May between 2pm and 4pm”. I cannot tell you the complexity of feelings that went through me at that moment, of relief, of fear, of gratitude, of stress.…
